Curious how others have approached customer due diligence especially when there are 5-10 key customers? I think it can always be a challenge to get good customer feedback while maintaining confidentiality for the seller.
In our latest acquisition, we worked with our board member, Bruce Kidd, to do old fashioned customer interviews. Bruce was "hired" by the seller to conduct customer experience and loyalty discussions, as well as anecdotal market analysis based on the customer's commentary. Bruce talked to 14 customers and found 13 of them to be "Truly Loyal" to our acquisition target. This gave us a ton of confidence to proceed with the acquisition.
Bruce does this work for PE firms too and I thought it might be worth sharing that this type of service is available, whether it is with Bruce or not. Here is his video about the service: https://vimeo.com/###-###-#### /da541932d6?share=copy
Customer Due Diligence
by a searcher from Indiana University at Bloomington
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You can find quality single shingle consultants to conduct the customer interviews on Catalant.
For bigger deals you can leverage the third party networks like GLG, Thirdbridge and Guidepoint, but those get expensive very very quickly and don’t have a lot of LMM or Middle Market people on the platform.